Like lamenting against your ongoing inability to levitate, as hard as you work at it, you’re going to be lamenting for a long time, Mr. President, if you think the lack of economic progress by the middle class is going to change under your policies. Such will be the case when you fundamentally fail to understand where economic success comes from.

Throughout yesterday’s self-proclaimed “important speech” on our economy, you decried the seeming injustice of a person who “works hard”, only to come up short. But if hard work were all that was required for success, we could simply encourage people to repeatedly dig holes with hand shovels and then fill them back up. Backbreaking work for sure, and a task that has a great track record of not making people rich.

Where you and your fellow policy-makers consistently miss the mark is in never realizing that hard work for hard work’s sake achieves nothing. What really counts is pleasing people.

To please someone, you have to put that other person’s needs ahead of your own. It’s an inherently giving act. You have to know the wants of the other person, and then do something that they value. It’s the very opposite of the “Me Generation”, the rise of which might just correlate with your noted middle-class stagnation.

If you want to achieve a lot of success, do something that a lot of people value. And if you want extreme success, do something that a lot of people value, but in a way that very few other people can do. This, and only this, explains why top entertainers, for example, make what they make – they make a lot of people very happy, and their skills are incredibly difficult to duplicate.